2008 Woodie Awards
Book review: Nalo Hopkinson's "The New Moon's Arms"
ISU English Professor Brian Attebery
Issue date: 4/11/07 Section: Opinion
Toronto-based writer Nalo Hopkinson burst onto the scene a few years ago with a book called Brown Girl in the Ring, which won the Warner Aspect prize for best first novel, the Locus Award, and the John W. Campbell Award for best new science fiction writer. Combining near-future speculation with Caribbean folk culture, her novel showed that the genre of science fiction had outgrown its white, male geekiness and was ready to take on a number of new issues and perspectives.
Hopkinson fulfilled the promise of her first book with another science fiction novel, Midnight Robber, which was named as a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year for 2000 and was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Since then Hopkinson has branched out into other fields, editing volumes of fabulist fiction, Canadian science fiction, and post-colonial SF, and publishing a historical novel called Salt Roads and a collection of short stories called Skin Folk. Now she has written a new work that some might call magical realism: the novel The New Moon's Arms. It is funny, lyrical, mysterious, and immersed in the complex culture of the Caribbean. The book has an unlikely heroine: Chastity Lambkin, who prefers to go by the name Calamity. Calamity's father has just died, setting off several sorts of midlife crises. The story moves both forward and backward from that point, as she deals with her father's death, her fears that he might have done away with her mother, her uneasy relationship with her own grown daughter, her memories of a childhood on an island now lost to a hurricane, and her attempts to form new relationships with a couple of attractive younger men and with a young boy cast up by the sea.
Everything is made more interesting and more difficult by the fact that she is going into menopause-and her hot flashes seem to be accompanied by magical manifestations. An old bicycle appears out of nowhere. The tree she used to climb on the lost island of Blessée shows up in her yard on the island of Dolorosse. The child she rescues from the sea might just be a seal-creature-the kind of transforming seal-man that Scottish folklore calls a "selkie." He speaks an unknown language, has webbed fingers and toes, and favors raw shrimp for a snack.
Hopkinson fulfilled the promise of her first book with another science fiction novel, Midnight Robber, which was named as a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year for 2000 and was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Since then Hopkinson has branched out into other fields, editing volumes of fabulist fiction, Canadian science fiction, and post-colonial SF, and publishing a historical novel called Salt Roads and a collection of short stories called Skin Folk. Now she has written a new work that some might call magical realism: the novel The New Moon's Arms. It is funny, lyrical, mysterious, and immersed in the complex culture of the Caribbean. The book has an unlikely heroine: Chastity Lambkin, who prefers to go by the name Calamity. Calamity's father has just died, setting off several sorts of midlife crises. The story moves both forward and backward from that point, as she deals with her father's death, her fears that he might have done away with her mother, her uneasy relationship with her own grown daughter, her memories of a childhood on an island now lost to a hurricane, and her attempts to form new relationships with a couple of attractive younger men and with a young boy cast up by the sea.
Everything is made more interesting and more difficult by the fact that she is going into menopause-and her hot flashes seem to be accompanied by magical manifestations. An old bicycle appears out of nowhere. The tree she used to climb on the lost island of Blessée shows up in her yard on the island of Dolorosse. The child she rescues from the sea might just be a seal-creature-the kind of transforming seal-man that Scottish folklore calls a "selkie." He speaks an unknown language, has webbed fingers and toes, and favors raw shrimp for a snack.
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